64-Player For The Weekend, Sir?

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The Battlefield 3 beta wraps up on the 10th, and so to get the final stress testing done DICE have confirmed that they will be opening up 64-player Caspian Border servers – meaning maximum 32 vs 32 team counts, vehicles, and everything else – for the final weekend. How many of your are on the beta? We should probably orchestrate some kind of massed RPS man-shoot?

Too bad choppers can’t barrel roll. Hoping they change that, because as of now if you roll too far, you start to fall out of the sky and can’t roll back over. I’m having flashbacks to 2142’s gunships here, none of them of their pleasant aspects.

Just played about an hour of this map and have to say I am pleasantly surprised that everyone does NOT go immediately for vehicles to whore those out the entire map. I mean, at first you want to get in and try every vehicle, but when you do and you get it out of your system, the battles become….amazing.

Also, I did not experience any lag or frame rate issues at all on a packed 64 player server.

Unfortunately, I have a SWTOR beta to attend to this weekend, so I probably won’t play much of this map :[

My thoughts echo yours however I ask myself is it a bad thing that nobody wants to use the vehicles? Does this mean nobody likes that combat, is it because the audience has moved on since Battlefield 2/BC2?

In my game there were at least five people stood on the runway at any one time.

What they don’t realize is (nice new feature) that you can spawn into the jet on death if one is free. I did that at least 3 times :D

Hope that feature survives the beta. My main problem is that my x52 wasn’t recognized. Though I did plug it in after booting the game.

But yes, that map is bloody awesome. Just had fun back in my default persona of anti tank class. Tanks are far more fearsome enemies to face from the front but those lucky shots to the tracks fuck em up big style.

Although, sans bugs (which make me cry) it is the most refined infantry rush map I have played across both BC1 and 2 and this obviously. Both sides are evenly balanced and playing your position is key.
If conquest shapes up just as well, with open maps, loads of MBT’s and all that jazaroo, it should be great.

What’s the point of this so-called Beta when there’s only one map in it (and yet game is full of bugs at every corner)? Nice, now we’ll actually have a chance to test something more… notable for this game.

Flying is pretty evil at the moment. Everyone has the Stinger unlocked but naturally, due to the map constraints until now, no one has flares in his Jet loadouts. You’re not enjoying the scenery for long right now.

Choppers have paper armor, currently. If there’s even one half-decent jet pilot on the other team, you’re fucked inside a minute of takeoff. Jet rounds push choppers over like palsied cattle. And choppers can’t right themselves once inverted, you lose all control. Flares don’t reload fast enough to deal with the sheer number of Stingers on the field, either.

Good luck trying to get any number of people onto the same server at the same time. 5 of us from ARPS tried to use the party system to get on a server together. It was a comedy of errors, really. It’ll probably be even worse trying to get on one of the 64 player servers.

Here is why it simply is extremely difficult to do: The Quick Match button. That button throws you into the first server it finds that’s open. So with this many people always playing (as it’s beta and there’s a bunch of people playing) they’re all constantly filling the servers back up. The only thing that may work is sorting by players in the server and joining a 10/32 and hoping more people enter the server along with your people’s.

There IS work around for the whole squad problems…while it by no means is a good option, is to enter into an empty server and making your friends join your team fast enough to default to your squad. It is a shitty work around, but hell it works and it does give you dib’s on loads of the vehicles like the Jets, Heli’s and tanks if you wanna test them out. Also, another thing, BF3 doesn’t allow you to do anything if their’s less than 8 people total.

I was lucky enough to spawn in a jet one of the times I snuck into a server. Knowing nothing at all about the flying of airy metal I accidentally clicked “e” and exited the aircraft on the ground. Luckily I got back in before the planespawn campers got it. Flying the thing was difficult, I think I went halfway into Kazakhstan before returning to the action – only to get shot down by someone who obviously spends too much time playing manshooters. Shame on you trollsechskeeljo22… I was just starting to like that thing.

i actually find it much easier to get good scores on that map playing as squishy infantry. due to its openness, it is very easy to stay under the radar of most vehicles and you can pick your fights… at least thats my experience, played 2 rounds earlier and came 2nd and 1st respectively, and i only touched a tank for one life to give it a go. havn’t tried jets yet, i hated them in BF2 but i am happy as an infantryman, not once did a jet even try to bomb me… or even consider me a target… seems there is a better hierarchy in the battle now, with jets fighting jets/choppers… tanks fighting tanks and infantry slipping through the gaps doing the real damage.

Boo, I was watching an amusing/sickening argument and then I got disconnected.
Troll #1 had just played the “I’ve been playing Battlefield since BF2, noob” card, and Troll #2 had yet to respond. They were both accusing each other of being children, and rubbish at the game, and CoD fans, and so on. Shame, I was really enjoying that.
Oh, and I guess BF3 was fun as well.

Same here, in BF2 i mostly played the more infantry-focused city maps like Strike at Karkand, Sharqi Peninsula and Mashtuur City (I’ll definitely have to get that DLC for BF3). They just had more balanced and less random-feeling gameplay.

It seems to be lagging horribly for me and a lot of other people too from waht I hear in many servers. Up to a point where driving a vehicle is impossible and walking seems to be on ice… Hope they fix it, this is unplayable

Awesome, can’t wait to get stuck in but no time to do so for a while. Is my once -awesome, now not -so-much rig going to cut it on a 64 player map though? Anyone got a sense for what sort of specs you need?

Mine is a 3Ghz quad-core Q6850 (about 4.5 years old), 4GB ram and a GTX 260. Up to it do you think? Internet connection is BT Infinity, so that’s OK I guess…

I most enjoyed driving the tank, perhaps as it reminded me of my recent and well enjoyed play of World of Russian Tanks. Why, yes I played German tanks. Does my massive, angry sense of betrayal show?
Anyway, liked WoT and fun to translate it into an FPS.

Jet flying was Neato! but overall seemed mostly pointless in terms of the ground combat. If you practice a lot and then can fend off enemy jets, dodge ground fire and actually hammer the enemy at the right time and place…I salute you sir. I mostly tattooed the earth with my face. And body parts.

I even like Metro, although I try to die as little as possible. Adds a zing!

Played it and it lags like hell. Initially the buggy beta turned me off from buying the game, but recently I warmed up to it and just yesterday decided I’m going to preorder it the next day. Today I play caspian border and it turned me off again.

This makes me wonder the reason for opening up Caspian Border for the rest of the Beta on PC. Whatever the reason though, it doesn’t really matter at this point for me. I’ve already canceled my pre order. The tipping point for me was not knowing whether my Origin Master ID would be the only name I can have in game at release. Everything I have read suggest that you won’t be able to use a different name for your soldier.

I might buy the game in the future if I no longer have to use Origin and most of the other EA related issues I have with this mess (not talking about the bugs in beta) are fixed. The game it self is not that bad, but DICE made some decisions I don’t like and I think most of them were forced by EA.

I suppose it’s the whole “this is way too much like CoD” sentiment going around the ‘nets.

This beta highlights what’s wrong with using a round of testing as a marketing advertisement. Too many people got a bad first impression and now it’s definitely killed the buzz around the game somewhat.

There’s only a month left. Are you telling me they will be able to destroy all of the possible bugs in a month? The console version is going to have to printed soon, those bug fixes will obviously not make the cut.

And if you think they’re going to fix the PC first, you be crazy, yo. DICE are trying to get as many COD fans as possible, which I assume is what a huge part of this “beta” was about. In-house testing has gone on for months and months, and many games go that route and do fine. BF3 could have been the same way, but they wanted to market the game harder.

I mean just look at how you could get early access, by buying MoH. Yea… they want you to beta test SO HARD for those 2 days of exclusiveness that you got from preordering it.

Nope, what the poster above says is correct. Almost nothing will change between now and the end of the beta. If the beta actually mattered, besides some fine tuning for player counts and stress testing, it would’ve been done six or more months in advance. It takes quite a bit of time to get the ball rolling on big changes.

A majority of the bugs will exist for 1-2 months after the beta ends. People who think a Beta illustrates a completely different product from release, besides in concept, in this day and age are stupid. Why do you think a majority of Google products are always in Beta?

Bugs will be fixed, certainly not all of them as some probably haven’t even been discovered. I have noticed nothing game breaking but I am sure there are some things getting polished. Not to mention the version we are playing is probably already behind the working version. If they are not gold yet that means they are still in bug fixing mode, so there is already a better version of the game. The up to date version they are currently working on. They were probably aware of and addressing the majority of the bugs we see in the beta before we even played it.

While this is certainly a marketing move as well I think the main purpose would be for backend testing and then secondary to that finding any major bugs that they hand’t seen in internal testing yet. While any NEW bugs may or may not get fixed before going gold, there will be improvements.

“The console version is going to have to printed soon, those bug fixes will obviously not make the cut.”
Day one patch?

“Why do you think a majority of Google products are always in Beta?” The same reason this is called a beta, because it has issues they are aware of and working on.

“It takes quite a bit of time to get the ball rolling on big changes.” Certainly no major changes, but bug fixes and balance tweaks are not major changes.

My experience has been pretty much the exact opposite to yours. In fact, I’ve only seen one laggy server so far. Then again, my sample size is very small (~10 servers) so I cannot generalize. At this point, the theory that your PCs really do suck and should be made fun of must still be considered unproven.

Thanks both. After extensive ‘testing’ last night I can conclude that joining nearly empty servers is lovely and smooth, but as the player count increases over the 40-50 mark it becomes unplayably laggy/my computer stops being able to cope. It’s consitent across all servers so maybe it’s my PC…

The stupid thing is I’m still enjoying myself enourmously even when it grinds to a juttery slide show. Time to upgrade…any one got any spare change?

Not to be a jerk or call imply anyone is stupid here specifically, but is ANYONE considering this game on release day? It’s a DICE game, that pretty much GUARANTEES 6 months of necessary patches, does it not?

I’d love to play, but Origin isn’t letting me. My first try ended with the web browser saying “Sorry soldier, your browser isn’t supported”. So I switched to Firefox, and now it’s been “Matchmaking…” for the last 20min.

mat kinh thoi trang
I take pride in the fact that I can hook my PC variant to any screen and it will play better in better detail than your console. I am jealous of built in VOIP on the PS3 though. Says the console kid if it were not for PC your games would still be sprite based 3d without the older generation “Discarded computers” MS and Sony would not have a product to sell your using OLD TECH KID.
Sad troll argument forfeit in one post your troll = Fail.